Is there anything funnier than tiny cat pants?

Monthly Archives: September 2008

I still can’t decide if it’s a good show or not, but I like it. I watched two episodes back to back last night because I’d forgotten it was on (not a good sign) but squealed with delight over and over while watching (a good sign).

I think, to Alan Ball’s credit, he’s managed to capture exactly in TV form trashy beach reading. I watch that show, I wish it could go on a little longer, but when it’s over, I’m not mulling over themes or symbolism or anything.

I am, though, I must say, delighted beyond words to see the return of chest hair to television. Not that I’m kicking anyone out of bed, mind you, but whew fan myself and call me sugar, chest hair just says to me “I have testosterone throbbing through my strong limbs. Do you mind if I scoop you close in and breathe in the luxurious scent of your hair and then kiss you right where you neck gives way to your shoulder?”

Edited to add: “your neck” Apparently chest hair’s first language is not English.

Okay, so I noticed Sunday that when I started up my computer, the firewall wasn’t on. I thought the Butcher had turned it off, so I turned it back on. Yesterday, though, same thing. Started the computer, it took forever to start, and the firewall was off. Turned it back on. Tried to run spy sweeper, which they give us for free at work, and it keeps crashing.

So, here’s the even scarier deal. Today, I’m attempting to write a brilliant, insightful post about the stock market tanking, which is difficult enough because I don’t know anything about finances, when I’m all like “Wasn’t it Atrios who said something about how much less your retirement fund is worth today?” So, I go to google Atrios, and the google results all show up right, but when I click on any link, I’m taken wherever the fuck and not to the actual link. Then just now, the whole browser appears to shut down and I get an offer to scan my disk for viruses, but I am not stupid, or that stupid anyway, and so I just quit out of it.

Clearly, something is very wrong. My question for you, dear internets, is what can I do to make it right? I already have the stupid spyware sweeper from work. I have always run McAfee, also provided to me from work, and I use the newest Firefox.

How did this happen and what can I do to fix this and protect myself better in the future?

Why is this even getting play at “Taxing Tennessee”? Just because pastors may have to pay taxes if they publicly endorse parties and candidates? A congregation’s tax-free non-profit status is an entitlement by any other name. Instead of welfare queens, we’ve got a lot of welfare clerics running around making lots of money and not giving anything back to our common public life (and please no explanations about how proselytizing people is a public service).

This is not true. Churches are tax-exempt. Pastors are not. They still have to pay income tax just like everyone else and sales tax on their own stuff just like everyone else. When a pastor manages to conflate his private life and the life of the church so completely that he’s avoiding paying either income or sales tax, he’s committing tax fraud.

Conflating the tax status of pastors with the tax status of churches is a mistake. They are not one in the same. Which is, to me, why this nonsense is even more infuriating. People do conflate pastors with their churches and do conflate the views of the pastor with the established will of the church and those are not and should not be the same thing. A pastor is, at the end of the day, just human and just as likely to be wrong as the next person.

Taking political advice from your pastor is as wise as taking spiritual advice from your senator.

I started my long slide out of Christianity when I realized that, unless God were incredibly cruel to people who didn’t deserve it, there could be no Hell, or at least no one in it. After all, everyone I know has someone whose life is a little better because that first person is in it, no matter how big a jackass that first person is. So, if you love Jackass A, even if I hate him, even if I know he deserves to rot, how can I wish for you an eternity separated from the person you love? How could that be Heaven for you, without all your loved ones, even the fuckers?

My dad has this theory, which I love, that Heaven and Hell could be the same place, but when you are stripped of the blinders of this life, and you can fully see the whole weight of your actions and understand the magnitude of the suffering you caused or the pleasure you spread, that same place could be for you either Heaven or Hell.

I mention all this because I guess, at the end of the day, I don’t know how to be out of sympathy with the lovers–and I mean that with a small, untawdry “l”–the frail, imperfect people who try to open themselves up to other frail, imperfect people and to do their best by them.

Yeah, I know all the cool slang the young kids use and throw it around just to ruin it for you! That’s right, just like I’ve ruined pit bulls and rap music with my driving around with both of them coming out of my car, and you hoping to see somebody worth seeing and ending up with the likes of me, yes, me, who is now just as firmly associated with pit bulls and rap music as any ne’er-do-well in your mind, I’m also taking up ruining good slang for your illegal indulgences.

You might ask “why” young Nashville, why would I go around ruining perfectly good stuff by associating itself with me? It’s not on purpose. It just seems to be my luck.

And so, in keeping with that theme, I am apparently single-handedly ruining Whites Creek.

Okay, let us backtrack. Because, Nashville, you know I love you, but my pet-peeve with you is the way that you use “rough” as a euphamism for “a lot of black people” or “bad” as a euphamism for “a lot of black people.” I hate being warned out of Shelby Bottoms because it’s in a “rough” part of town or dissuaded from taking my nephews to play in the fountain at Bicentennial Park because it’s in a “bad” part of town only to discover that what you actually mean is that it’s in a part of town where a bunch of black people live.

You know, Nashville, it about makes you into the boy who cried wolf. There are indeed bad parts of town, rough parts of town, but who the hell can tell from talking to you whether a part of town is rough or bad or just a place where a lot of black people live?

So, I told folks we were moving to Whites Creek and a couple of people were like “Oh, that’s rough up there.” And I was like “Um, yeah, did I mention the half a million dollar homes behind us? The homes with Cadillacs across the street?” But I think it’s just that there are a lot of black people in Whites Creek, that that’s supposed to make it “rough.” Like folks who can afford the homes back behind us are just waiting for an excuse to loot or riot?

I don’t know. Anyway, my point is that if you were living in Whites Creek, getting street cred for living in a “rough” place, I am yet again single-handedly ruining that reputation with my presense.

Sorry about that. And now that I know what “going to a prayer meeting” or “having a prayer meeting” means, you can rest assured that little bit of slang is now too dorky for you to use as well.

–I am tired of being sick. When I finally unsicken up, I’m laminating myself to prevent the incursion of any other crap.

–Is even floating the idea of having a great big show wedding for your kid so that your boss can score some political points really that cool? I don’t know. I don’t like it, though.

–So what if grizzly bears and polar bears regularly interbreed? Scientists, sometimes I have a hard time understanding why you’re excited about things. Will this make a monster bear that can take over the world or what?

–I hired folks to come in and clean the house. they’re on their way there now. As is the Butcher. I hope he’ll help them with the trash, because I never did make it off my couch yesterday once I got back inside.

–Last night I had a dream that the Hall of Fame was buckling to criticism that they don’t have enough women in the Hall so they found this woman from the hills of Kentucky and claimed that she was some great missing link to the history of Country music, lost to history, but crucial to its development. But everyone in town thought her induction was a total sham and bullshit and so I was roped into doing the ceremony, being the one who had to introduce this woman and make the case for why she was going in.

So I’m up there doing my best and I make up some stuff about her and she comes up, whispers in my ear that she’s got to go to the bathroom, exits stage right, and leaves me up there to keep the crowd occupied. I’m leading them on our second round of “Mama Tried” when the folks at the Foundation tell me that she’s skipped out. “Nerves.”

I was going to sit out on my front porch and liveblog my front yard, but it’s very, very sunny there and I, luckily, have an abundance of shade just a few feet away from said front porch, so I am in a plastic chair, listening to the neighbor kids set off their car alarm while their mom yells at them and they insist they are not setting it off on purpose. The dog is milling about next to me, eating grass and enjoying the weather. The next door neightbor dog has finally lost interest in barking at us.

There are things to be done. Most importantly, I have to figure out how to keep my bed from rolling around my room, because otherwise I’m going to break my neck trying to get into it. And I need to rustle something up for lunch.

Mack brought us over an ironing board, which is doing duty as a makeshift dining room table. And this morning, I saw the picture of a naked girl that someone put behind my closet door. I’m not pointing fingers, but when I accused the obvious subject, he said it was Kathy’s idea. I can’t decide which would be funnier, if he and Kathy had conspired to put it there or if he thought he could get away with blaming her.

I wish I knew where the camera was, because I would take a picture of Mrs. Wigglebottom just laying… lying… lounging in the grass, rolling around, scratching her back, pointing her belly towards the sun, while a yellow butterfly flitters by like it’s checking to see if this is some exotic, snorting flower. Seeing my dog happy in the grass makes me happier than I know how to tell you. The faces of the bulldog breeds are so expressive and she just has this look on her face of pure joy.

I’ll be curious to see the place in the spring, but right now, it seems obvious that the one thing it needs is more flowers. Right now the only things in bloom around the house are this spider-plant like thing with purple flowers here in the front yard and this orange viney thing that seems to attract humming birds in the back.

The thing I’m most surprised about is how soft the grass is under my feet.

I should be unpacking, but it’s like 78 here and sunny and my dog has convinced me that there’s no place I need to be more now than right here.

I don’t think I’ll take my clothes off and roll in the grass, though, at least not until the neighborkids go in.

Oh, People of Earth, there’s much to complain about, much to stress about, much to mull over in order to try to figure out how to quickly fix.

But how can I help but be distracted by joy over my first night in the house?

Every time I step into the bathroom and look into my back yard, I cannot believe we live here. It’s like living at a park, in a park. This morning, I watched the sun fill the whole house with light, these beautiful jewel tones and I thought, damn, I can’t believe I’m lucky enough to be here at this moment, watching this.

Sometimes, from the outside, it’s hard to understand if you’re misunderstanding what’s going on in the Republican party, and I have been in the middle of my own panic, so I may have missed this. But doesn’t it seem like we’re witnessing something very, very important just below the surface?

I start by saying two things that I have observed about Southerners–one, a lot of them are Southern Baptist, which means, when they don’t like how something’s going, they have no compunction about breaking off and doing something different while still considering themselves to be the true carriers of the proper torch and two, they don’t like to be played for fools.

So, whenever it was that I had CNN, I noticed that it seemed to be primarily the Southern Republicans who were on my screen hollering about the bailout and how they were insulted by it (props to Bob Corker, btw). And now McCain seems to think nothing of suggesting cancelling the first debate, which, of course, is in Mississippi.

From McCain’s end, I can see it. The benefits to him outweight the costs, because just like Democrats have grown complacent with the Black vote, the Republicans have come to expect that they will always have the white Southern vote (see, for instance, Bill Hobbs’s gleeful plans for Republican victory in Tennessee for election day). So, McCain can show his ass to Mississippi and cancel a debate they were expecting to host because what are they going to do about it? Right?

But I feel like I saw an inkling on CNN of what Southern Republicans are going to do about it and I’m just curious if I’m reading the landscape right. I think Southern Republicans are positioning themselves as the “true” Republicans, who stand in opposition both to the Democrats and to national Republicans who are out of touch with “regular” folks.

———-

And because you know I can’t let this Palin stuff go, I also wonder how she’s playing with the majority of Southern Republican women, the longer she’s out there in public. Because I have observed that Southern women in general have been taught to play dumb very well, but that they have litte patience for actual dumb women. I think Palin looked very attractive to Southern women when it seemed as if she was just playing dumb in that way Southern women do, but the more it seems as if she may actually be out of her league? I’m just saying, at some point, the conventional wisdom among white Southern women is going to go from “Oh, Sarah Palin’s kind of like us but Alaskan” to “Oh, Sarah Palin, bless her heart.”

And I think we all know the Republican ticket is in trouble when it attracts a significant Bless Your Heart quotient.

So, I think that we have the whole moving thing covered, especially if Kathy T. and the Professor show up on Friday. The Butcher has actually gotten some folks together, large able-bodied folks who are not having some kind of emotional and physical breakdown.

The second cable guy was much more competent than the first and got us all hooked up at the house. He was surprised that the first guy couldn’t do it, and frustrated that they’d scheduled us so late in the day, but very nice about my dad standing around near him cracking jokes.

The house is ready to go, I think. It looks terrific and I really cannot wait to be sitting in it. I think we’re in good shape on the large things we need (Thanks, Dad!), except for my dream of awesome bookshelves. But we’re going to have to make a run to Target for little plastic bins to put things in once we know what kinds of things we have to put in bins we might get.

The maids are coming to the apartment on Monday. I am tempted to hire them to come to the house all the time, too, but I’ll have to see if we can squeeze it in our budget. But damn, it would be worth it.

We have so much crap and it’s just crap. I feel like I’m filling a garbage bag for every box I pack. Still, you know what? It’s worth it to not haul it over to the house.

So, yeah, here’s another boring post about the move that will not die. It’s like a bad horror movie, in that it’s horrible to me but not to everyone else. Even my dad last night at dinner was like “Why are you being such a dork about this?” And my dad is a world-class fretter. He won the gold in the fretting Olympics in ’68, ’72, and ’08 and medaled in every other year.

I’m just trying to help the “English First” or “English Only” crowd come up with some slogans that might better fit their needs.

Thanks to Tiny Pasture, we learn that only five folks showed up at the scheduled English First protest and that, better yet, the folks were targeting a fund-raising breakfast for a Goodlettsville state senator.

Yes, folks, the people protesting to make Nashville English-first targeted a fund-raising breakfast for a Goodlettsville state senator. Best quote?

The Goodlettsville Democrat has made no comment about the measure and has no role in city government.

How did this happen? No, don’t tell me. I like just laughing about it.

Nashville, it’s not that I don’t believe the Butcher’s friends are going to show up on Saturday, it’s just that… well, I don’t believe the Butcher’s friends are going to show up on Saturday. He says “So what? I’ll just move everything myself. I can do it.”

This seems to me so dumb. Why would we take all day to move everything ourselves when, if we just had even a little dependable help we could have everything on and off the truck in a couple of hours?

So, I’m asking for help. If you’re looking for something to do on Saturday, we could really use the help moving. We’ll get started around eight or nine and we have to have the truck back before four so one way or another it’s got to be done by then.

So, yeah, I guess it’ll kind of suck and I can’t afford to pay you (though I will let you stand next to my old bookshelves, on the off chance they come up with some trick to grant them a reprieve from the dump), but I will buy beer and pizza and I’ll let you pet my dog. Or the Butcher. Whichever you like.

I am not psychic, nor do I play a guy who is pretending to be a psychic so he can work for the Santa Barbara police for laughs nor a guy who is through pretending to be a psychic so that he can work for the California Bureau of Investigation for serious, but I swear this morning as I was watching CNN, I heard the Church Secretary in my head and he said, “Oh, sure, we have to hear from third-party candidates Barr and Nader about the economy but nothing from McKinney?”

I mean, neither Barr nor Nader is any more likely to ever be president than McKinney, so I’m confused about why they get airtime and she doesn’t. Does Nader even have a party backing him?

I mean, I like the idea of hearing from third-party candidates every once in a while on these kinds of important issues because they have nothing to lose. They can say exactly what they’re thinking, which is useful to me as I try to understand what’s going on.

I’m just curious about how it gets decided who is important enough to take semi-seriously and who is not.

Also: Speaking of CNN this morning, have any of you seen that Korean Air ad? There’s a lingering shot of a blue high heel shoe on a woman’s foot and then a man has a bottle of champaign right by his crotch which he then lets off with a “pop.” I was dying! I mean, usually the vagina penis symbolism is not so blatant. (Or much more.)

Just so we’re clear: when you hold someone down and force a broomstick inside of them against their will, you are raping them. If you open a door into a room and see a group of boys holding someone down and looking like they’re on the verge of sticking a broom inside of someone you don’t tell them to break it up and assume everything is okay. What you are witnessing is attempted rape.

See, I bring this up because I see over on Yahoo this headline–“Horrific football hazing case shakes NM town” and I read the description of this case, which involves football players holding down other football players and shoving broomsticks up their butts while the coaches acted as if nothing out of the ordinary was happening (and perhaps nothing out of the ordinary was happening, if you’d like a sickening thought for the afternoon. Maybe this is what boys on the team had done to them and that’s why they’re turning around and doing it to others. I don’t know.) and I keep waiting for the term “rape” or “attempted rape” to come up.

Yeah, sure we get into some sexual assault stuff there towards the end.

But the reason I bring this up is that it occurs to me upon reading this article that the coaches literally did not understand what they were seeing or hearing about.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not at all letting them off the hook. I’m just saying that that’s fucked up, so fucked up you have to say it “fu-u-ucked up.”

You’d think “Don’t put things inside other people without their permission” would be an easy concept for folks to understand, but there’s always some bullshit–“But what if she’s wearing a really short skirt? Then can I put something inside her even if she doesn’t want me to?” “But what if he wants to join the football team? Is it okay then?”

Seriously, no. Just don’t put things inside other people if they don’t want you to.

It’s just not that difficult.

I suspect that this kind of sexual assault is far more common than I’m aware of and I suspect that part of the problem of even beginning to address it is that so many people refuse to recognize it for what it is. I mean, look at this article, calling it “hazing” or “bullying.” No, it’s raping. You have a bunch of rapists on your football team. And a bunch of coaches who don’t think that’s such a big deal.

I just want to state my biases up front. I believe that dieting is an incredible waste of time, even if it leads to weight-loss. I think that sitting around obsessing about calories and fat grams and so on is ridiculous and a way of getting women to accept a useless, but time-consuming task with the promise of happiness at the end in order to keep us distracted and busy while fun stuff happens elsewhere.

I have no use for it.

I do believe that, if you eat good food, you will feel good, and believe me, I am all about feeling good. If I had to choose between a quarter pounder and a home-made tamale, I’m picking the tamale every time. And I would eat that spinich and peanut sauce Thai dish whose name I don’t know all the time if I could.

And I think moving around is great.

But, in general, I don’t give a shit if you eat well or not, if you move around or not. Maybe it’s coming from a long line of fat people and people with various mobility issues, but I just could not give a shit less about what kind of shape other people are in. I mean, I love you, ladies, but Christ Jesus, the amount of time and self-worth you put in to being thinner just boggles my mind. Perfectly beautiful people that folks already want to spend time with right now who are going to be happier ten, twenty, fifty pounds from now. I just don’t want to hear it.

And I myself have believed that I am only thirty pounds away from true happiness. The Shill and I were flipping through old photographs of me and even at my thinnest, I believed I was fat. Even in college, when I look now at photos and see a perfectly ordinary sized person, I thought I was fat.

So, to recap–I believe people have a right to feel good, right now, as they are. I don’t give a shit if you lay in bed all day eating bon bons if that makes you feel good; in fact, scooch over, I’m coming in.

But of course, I live in a society in which a woman’s worth is based a great deal on how thin she is (though, as I’m sure thin people will point out, you don’t want to be too thin or that’s a problem, so it’s lose/lose, which is just how it works).

So, I come in to work today and everyone has decided that I’ve lost weight and look great. This is particularly funny to me because I spent all yesterday feeling like I might, just for fun, bleed to death or barf or both. In other words, there’s just no objective way I could “look great” because I feel like shit.

And yet, apparently, losing weight is enough.

And again, girls, I love you, but no, I don’t know if I’ve lost any weight or, if so, how much. And I don’t like talking about it like I’m achieving some victory for woman-kind. I don’t own a scale. I try to get on them facing the other way at the doctor so that I don’t have to have a number in my head that defines (or not) myself to me. I don’t scrutinize myself in the mirror, so, no, I don’t know if I’ve lost weight.

And if I have, women in my office building, you know it’s because I’ve been sick. Which I know you know because you’re making jokes about how you wish you’d get diagnosed with some disease so that the doctor would give you a pill that made you lose weight.

I don’t know how to respond to that. Really? Being thinner is so much better than being fatter that you’d take an illness to get that way? I find that baffling.

On the other hand, though, I want to acknowledge that the whole PCOS treatment has changed my body in ways I’m kind of still making heads or tails of. For one, I do feel like I have different energy than I used to, not more, exactly, but kind of long-term sustainable energy. I feel like my appetite is a lot different, that, depending on what I’m eating, I lose interest in what I’m eating long before I finish it. Or I’ll order something because I love it–like chicken fried steak–and it doesn’t please me to eat it.

I don’t know how else to describe this change. But I used to take great pleasure in, say, running over to the other building where there is a candy machine and getting some M&Ms in the middle of the afternoon and it doesn’t even cross my mind to do it now.

I don’t feel better after eating them. I don’t crave them.

I’m going to have to think about this some when I have more time, but the thing that strikes me most is that all my life I’ve believed my weight was a moral failing. Even when I could completely change my diet and my activity level and see no real weight loss, I still believed it was because I wasn’t trying hard enough, just didn’t want it bad enough. And now that I’m sitting here with a system full of metformin, what I keep wondering, the thought I can’t let go of, is this–Is this how “normal” people feel in their bodies?

And it really upsets me and kind of makes me mad, because this is not how I’ve felt at any point in my entire life. I mean, two months ago, if I’d had three quarters of a hamburger and half a large fry at lunch, I would have been dying by two or three in the afternoon. I would be so hungry and tired and I’d have been running to the candy machine for something to get me through until dinner for fear I’d be sick otherwise.

Yesterday, I ate my burger until I lost interest and ate my fries until I lost interest and I had a quarter of the burger left and half of the fries. It’s not like that all the time. I gladly ate at McDonalds like it was going out of style with the Shill. But I’m just saying, yesterday, I ate some of my lunch and I wasn’t hungry until supper and even then, I wasn’t starving, but just hungry.

And I want to be clear that I know that every fat person is not like me, but I literally am finding this experience just pisses me off. I mean, sure, if this is what you feel like all the time, having a salad for lunch seems like a swimming idea. Skipping sugary snacks? No bigging. Exercising more? Okay, yeah, I have energy I didn’t know I had and I’m finding it weirdly pleasurable to move around in it in ways I’ve never experienced before. I mean, holy shit, okay, yeah, now I get what folks are saying.

But I had to completely alter the chemistry of my body.

I mean, just call me Tireseus or something, folks, because I’m here to tell you that it’s different and not in a way you can know if you haven’t lived in both ways.

And I don’t like “both” either, because I just mean that, in my case, there are two ways (at least).

But what I mean is that all the lecturing and hectoring and diet modification in the world did me no good and only made me miserably unhappy. And it was a stupid waste of time.

And I’m grossed out by the idea that I’m supposed to be happy about being thinner, as if I lucked out by responding to that medicine in this way, when the fact that I need that medicine in the first place isn’t… I mean, it doesn’t suck or anything, but it’s not like I wake up every morning and am like “Woo hoo, I used to take no medicine and now I take this stuff in the morning and this stuff with dinner and wear this mask and…” I don’t know. I am glad to have stuff that makes me feel better, but I am having a hard time resolving myself to the idea that my own body and what it does on its own isn’t enough for me.

And, too, it’s not like I lost 20 pounds over the weekend. I think I look exactly the same as I did.

So… Yeah… I don’t know. The whole thing’s weird. And I want to be graceous about it, but I can’t quite figure out how to do that.

1. Cable guy? To the house but then denied the ability to DRILL HOLES IN MY FLOOR!!!!!!!! Jesus Christ, of course I want you to reschedule and send someone who can fish a line down a wall.

2. Cleaning crew? Scheduled and will walk through the apartment tomorrow and give me an estimate.

3. Truck? Scheduled.

4. Dad? Arrived and given tasks.

5. The Butcher? Grouched at and fussed over. But let me just say this, if you are the Butcher’s friend and he has ever done anything for you like helping you move or helping you paint and you do not show up on Saturday to help us move, you are forbidden from ever coming to our house. Seriously, if I catch you in my house, I will stab you with a knife or my dog, whichever is closer at hand. So far the list of folks thus allowed at our house who know the Butcher are the girl who helped paint, her husband, and the Redheaded Kid.

6. Walmart? I have turned EVEN MY FATHER–who I assumed was just going to go to work for Walmart as a greeter when he retired he loved them so much–against them. We went to Walmart last night to get keys made, ibuprofen, and covers for switches and outlets. There were no switch covers on the shelf so we had the chick who was making our keys page once for help in hardware, no one came. We had electronics page once for help in hardware, no one came, and then electronics paged twice for a manager, because they were frustrated no one came to hardware and a manager never showed up. So, we put everything but the keys and the ibuprofen back and went over to Lowe’s.

At Lowe’s we were greated by a dude who knew immediately which aisles had the things we needed in them and (and this is where I was like “Oh, Walmart, you may be in real trouble”), they were stocked and a penny cheaper than at Walmart.

Because Walmart can get away with a lot if they’re the cheapest game in town, but when they’re not?

Cue the ominous music.

7. Mack? Listened to tough but reassuring things from.

8. The Professor? Listened to tough but reassuring things from.

9. The dog? Switched to Target’s glucosamine pills and I can’t decide if I’m seeing a marked difference or just imagining it, but let’s go with seeing one.

10. Naps? Two hours in the afternoon while I waited for my dad and one on the couch after dinner and before bed.

11. Girly problems? Subdued.

12. Correct Tiny Cat Pants anniversary? Duly noted.

13. World Economy? Well, I have tried repeatedly this month to completely collapse it, but clearly I’ve only been able to bring it to the brink. I’ll try again today.

I’m laying here waiting for the doctor to call me back since, due to girly problems the likes of which I hope to never, ever experience again, I can’t really manage much but bed and bathroom. And a good self-pity cry.

Here is my new list for today:

1. Rent a truck.

2. Arrange for someone to clean this place next week.

3. Take the TV remote to the new house before the cable guy gets there.

4. Nothing.

That’s it. Just three things, unless I have to get to the doctor’s. In which case I will add that to my list at the top. I am laying here pondering the financial mess our country is in. I have nothing astute to say about it. Just that I’m holding my breath to see what comes of it. It is a little amazing to me that, after years of being told that the economy is just fine, now we’re being told we must immediately bail out the economy right now no questions asked, immunity for everyone, everyone gets to continue being rich.

The rich, you see, get to be socialists. We must be left to the vagaries of a free market.

Edited to add: Ibuprophen. If that doesn’t help, I have to go in tomorrow for lab work.

So I was all primed to come and write a great post on the fourth anniversary of Tiny Cat Pants when I went to look at my first post, just to take stock of how far I’d come (or not), I see that I actually started blogging on the 23rd of September, not the 22nd.

At the park today I met a little girl who I thought at first was named Cheryl. Cheryl, I thought, there’s a name you don’t hear very often, especially not on two year olds.

But then, as her parents extolled the virtues of their preschool and how glad they were that the two year old class was being split in two, because there really is such a difference between a 24 month old and a 35 month old, I realized they were calling her Feryl. Or perhaps they’re big fans of Old School and they named her after Will Ferrell? You know giving your kids last names as first names is very stylish.

Yes, Ferrell.

Or, as I heard it, Feral.

They named their darling baby Feral. And they’re trying to pass that name off as something classy. America, I have no words. My dad has this theory that when a kid turns 13, she or he should be allowed not to change his or her name, but to legally change his or her parents’ names, so that if you find your parents have named you Feral, you can name them, oh, I don’t know, Untamed and Wild, so you all match.

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Like Donnell Alexander says, "It's about completing the task of living with enough spontaneity to splurge some of it on bystanders, to share with others working through their own travails a little of your bonus life."

But, it's mostly the kind of place that folks looking for "girls and cars" stumble across by accident.